How to Apply the Legal Rules

The means by which legal rules are applied occurs through many different avenues, nearly all of which are dependent on the nature of the law being applied. As a typically rule, the two major categories of criminal law and civil law are privy to two different forms of oversight. This is called an indictment.

In civil laws, the oversight is undertaken primarily on the part of each of the parties involved in the dispute, and their legal representatives, because the aspects of the dispute can be found to be under the nature of a private offense. When a private offense had been found to have occurred, the offended party and their representatives file a suit against the other party, who becomes the defendant in the proceedings.

The suit is taken before a civil judge, who determines whether it has legal merits to proceed. If a suit is taken to court, unlike a criminal trial where culpability must be found “beyond a reasonable doubt” (meaning that the evidence must establish criminal responsibility a matter of legal fact), in a civil action, the plaintiff has to establish a burden of proof that the defendant has wronged them. If the do so, they are entitled to damages based on a selection of predetermined parameters.

It should be noted that criminal law and civil law are not always mutually exclusive in their ability to effect one another, as a civil case can be executed based on the findings and evidence obtained by a criminal case, or vice versa. An example would be in a case of criminal negligence that leads to death.

The party responsible for the negligence would be answerable to the law because of the violation of legal statutes, and also potentially liable to a civil action (likely under tort law) undertaken by the family of the dead person. If the individual is or is not found to be criminally negligent, that could be applied to the civil proceedings or not. However, criminal punishment will never be enacted by a civil court, nor could financial damages to an injured party be implemented by a criminal one.

Of course, implementation of penalties are enforced by the court through penalty of law in either criminal or civil rulings, which are implemented by an enforcement agency on the behalf of the court.

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